Posted
by
samzenpuson Thursday June 09, 2011 @04:24AM
from the problem-solved dept.

freedumb2000 writes "Europe just witnessed one of the largest piracy-related busts in history with the raid of the popular movie streaming portal Kino.to. More than a dozen people connected to the site were arrested after police officers in Germany, Spain, France and the Netherlands raided several residential addresses and data centers. Kino.to hosted no illicit content itself, but indexed material stored on file-hosters and other streaming services."

The only reason kino.to existed was to make advertising money on piracy and the police suspect that kino.to had mutual agreements with the hosters. Now, the law is unclear whether watching an illegit stream is illegal (probably not), so they are not going against the users of kino.to. But aquiring the source material to stream definitely involves piracy.
This is more of an organized crime case (and it is treated as such by the police and state attorney), then a "phonebook" thing.

No, the law is unclear about the legality of *using* kino.to and the policy is not moving against the users. What the *operators* of kino.to allegedly did in cooperation with their hosting buddies is quite clearly illegal though and that's what is being investigated right now.

According to my research, there are a lot of criminals being referenced in the phonebook websites worldwide, making it easier for them to communicate.Please take those sites down too.

Sincerely,

Killjoy_NL

The only slight difference being that the phonebook contains the same ratio of innocent people to guilty people as society, a torrent site specialising in exchanging illegally copied movies does not. Also, a phone book does not list next to each name the particular crime that individual specialises in, a torrent site lists each illegally posted movie next to the persons name you can download it from.

Torrent sites like the one in question exist to facilitate the illegal exchanging of files. If you think this

Allow me to play devil's advocate.... What if that percentage of "allegedly" copyrighted material was 80%, or 50% or only 25%?

Where do you draw the line in making a blanket judgement about a site that is acting as an Index of copyrighted material? What if the website indexed a legitimate percentage of non-copyrighted material - in addition to the copyrighted materials? Those with the best lobbyist / deepest pockets wins?

Furthermore, how is indexing copyrighted material wrong? If anything, the infringing parties are the ones making the content available without proper authorization. If indexing copyrighted data is illegal, I can think of several search engines that are going to get in trouble real soon (or rather, their CEOs). Unless the governments, judges and police are hypocrites and decide to make an exception with them, of course.

Where the music industry tells you too. It is easier, faster and cheaper to bullshit the police into arresting site admins than it is to go the proper legal route and sue them. Also makes up for deficiencies in local laws that fail to make linking to copyright material without permission a crime.

Copyright and patent infringement are the crimes of speaking forbidden things (whatever spin you like to put on it as benefitting mankind, this is fact). I guess it's an extension of this absurdity that that it becomes criminal to speak locations to things which it is forbidden to speak.

Of course, a list of criminals isn't quite the same thing as a list of locations.

Nah, nobody is worried about them anymore. And terrorists are the new communists, nobody takes you serious today if you talk about the Red Threat, but terrorists, ahhh, panic, they already killed in just a decade about as many people as traffic accidents do daily! Gotta be wary!

But you aren't arresting the people using the phone book, you are arresting the people making the phone book. Even if the phone book could potentially be used for bad things, it is the right of the publisher (at least in the U.S.) to make it. It is called free speech. There is a crap ton of print material out there from fringe groups that isn't stopped on this premise, much of it far more dangerous about how to commit crimes and blow stuff up and make dangerous drugs, but we don't arrest the people printing those. We might "ban" the books, but the authors are protected since they claim it is "for entertainment" or "educational." Why isn't the same true for websites cataloguing content. Honestly it reminds me of the case of a college student paper whose editors got in trouble in the 70s because they printed a listing of abortion clinics in other states where it was legal (the state they were in it was not). Eventually the thing got thrown out - it was free speech. The entire idea of spending millions of dollars attacking websites and thought crime is ridiculous no matter how you look at it. We'll be fighting the "war on piracy" forever, just like the "war on terror" and the "war on drugs." Fighting against ideas is like tilting at windmills!

"Kino.to hosted no illicit content itself, but indexed material stored on file-hosters and other streaming services."

Copying and pasting the first paragraphn is 1) misleading 2) an extremely poor way to do a SUMMARY. This is what is missing "GVU states that Kino.to was working closely with the sites that hosted the copyrighted films, and that they profited from commercial partnerships with these companies."

So it was not a SIMPLE linking as the first paragraph make seem to believe.

"Kino.to hosted no illicit content itself, but indexed material stored on file-hosters and other streaming services."
Copying and pasting the first paragraphn is 1) misleading 2) an extremely poor way to do a SUMMARY. This is what is missing "GVU states that Kino.to was working closely with the sites that hosted the copyrighted films, and that they profited from commercial partnerships with these companies."
So it was not a SIMPLE linking as the first paragraph make seem to believe.

Even still, why not go after those sites that hosted the films instead?

"Kino.to hosted no illicit content itself, but indexed material stored on file-hosters and other streaming services."
Copying and pasting the first paragraphn is 1) misleading 2) an extremely poor way to do a SUMMARY. This is what is missing "GVU states that Kino.to was working closely with the sites that hosted the copyrighted films, and that they profited from commercial partnerships with these companies."
So it was not a SIMPLE linking as the first paragraph make seem to believe.

Even still, why not go after those sites that hosted the films instead?

Because in Russia films host you...
No seriously - it is obvious that those sites are in "uncooperative" jurisdictions. So they go for the closer target to get some press. Kino.ru/so/ir/kp will likely be available any day now.

So they go for the closer target to get some press. Kino.ru/so/ir/kp will likely be available any day now.

Ok, but law did the 'closer target' break?
It's just that if there wasn't a good legal case, there's no good legal reason the police couldn't come and raid my home either, even if I'm not breaking any law. So that makes me feel some empathy with the raidees, making millions doing shady stuff or not.

Also, kino.to was making literally millions from advertisement. Euro-millions.

If they hadn't, they wouldn't be prosecuted.

Also, the police did not threaten to charge any leechers/downloaders, only uploaders.

This is sane.

It is actually unclear whether this is illegal. For example, Sharereactor was taken down when it started to ask for donations. But there never was a conviction, although that was kept pretty quiet. Now, Swiss law is a bit different, and there are incompetent and arrogant judges here, but they typically do not get away with it in the long run, hence no conviction. The thing is that as soon as there is a financial angle, it is a commercial enterprise and the rules on commercial misconduct are a lot stricter t

You have a point. I remember how hard was it to get Microsoft's development tools in Poland in the 90s. Things such as driver development kits, early "Visual" langauges, MSDN content were available within 45 minutes from the local pirates -- that's about as long as it took to copy things, or, later, burn them to CDs. Getting the same from local Microsoft reps/offices was a multiweek bureaucratic hurdle, even if you had money in your hand and were willing to pay right then and there. To be frank, Microsoft o

Copying and pasting the first paragraphn is 1) misleading 2) an extremely poor way to do a SUMMARY. This is what is missing "GVU states that Kino.to was working closely with the sites that hosted the copyrighted films, and that they profited from commercial partnerships with these companies."

So it was not a SIMPLE linking as the first paragraph make seem to believe.

Basically what was stated is that not only was kino.to taken down but also the filehosting and portal sites behind it. The people running these sites (kino.to and others) are not explicitly being charged for linking copyrighted material(ASFAIK this is still somewhat of a grayzone in Germany) But rather for building an organized criminal organization. If prosecuted in a German criminal court this could lead to a 5 year jail sentence.

An that is where "founding a criminal organization" comes in. Without the commercial gain from working with the ones offering actual infringing content, the prosecutor has nothing. With that gain, the case becomes direct profit ("direct" because of the close collaboration) from copyright infringement, that becomes "commercial copyright infringement" and since this was multi-person and organized, it becomes "founding a criminal organization". There are serious penalties for that.

Not this crap again. Pirate has very obviously become an accepted term for someone who infringes copyright. Why is this tired and meaningless argument that " a pirate has a boat and a wooden leg" trotted out again and again? It's language; fluid and changing. If we're going to bash copyright activist groups for being so stuck in their ways and unwilling to adapt, why can't everyone just accept that pirate now relates also to copyright infringers?

The "Waah Waah Content Pirates aren't Pirates, they don't have ships or parrots!" whine is even more tedious than the "Hackers are computer hobbyists, and not necessarily bad!" screed.

Language evolves (c.f., the original meaning of "geek" in the subject here).

I first heard the use of the word "pirate" in this modern context to refer to the people who were stealing satellite signals from premium cable TV networks back in the '70s, pre-dating popular Internet usage by around 15 years. Get over yourselves and move on.

More than a dozen people connected to the site were arrested after police officers in Germany, Spain, France and the Netherlands raided several residential addresses and data centers.

Spain has a tax on empty CDs/DVDs. Wasn't the justification for that to be that it would make non-profit piracy tolerated? (In my country, Hungary we have a similar tax, and it protects users of pirate sites.) This is the first time I hear that users of pirate sites are also prosecuted in Europe. What next, bittorrent users? (Like with Hurt Locker in US.)

Is it a crime in Tonga, (Kino.to) to list alleged 'copyright infringing' sites?How do I know that streaming an English movie from Kazakhstan or Burkina Faso is illegal if nobody can find out who owns the rights to stream those movies in/from those countries?If it's intellectual 'Property', could those countries tax that property, if, or even if they don't put it in the theaters there?

If they want worldwide rights, they should pay taxes on that property worldwide.

We got that joke running here as well (as do most countries afaik). The gag in it all is the combination of various little bits that make the whole "media tax" very fishy.

1. Allegedly, the reason for that levy on blank media is that you, the consumer, will use them to record copyrighted material, e.g. by making a copy of a record on a blank tape, or in today's word, a copy of the DVD that you borrowed from a friend. Our law even has a section that explicitly allows you to borrow legally bought media from personal friends (nobody on the internet is your friend, btw, that's established in court, so any internet sources are not part of the deal) and create a copy of it for your personal use.

2. Every single commercial DVD and BluRay (that would be subject to the grounds established in the first bullet point) now comes with copy protection.

3. The law now explicitly also disallows circumventing protection of any sort.

Question for 100: How am I supposed to execute my right to a copy if copy protection prevents me from copying and I must not disable this protection (even if it's trivial)?

I'd like to start off my reply by saying that although you group together a bunch of countries that share in common a levy on recordable media, the details can differ hugely between those countries.

For example, in point 1 you mention that "nobody on the internet is your friend, so any internet sources are not part of the deal". This, however, does not apply to The Netherlands where it is - for now - completely legal to download music, video and movies even if the rights holders have not given you explicit

Erh... what's that got to do with the levy on media to compensate for copies that must not be created?

The original statement for the reason why that levy exists was that it is legal to record from radio and TV, and that it is also legal (in my country) to create copies of content someone bought for a personal friend. If this is pretty much outlawed by including copy protection on all media and creating a law at the same time that outlaws circumventing copy protection, no matter whether it actually protects

There are two fallacies here that need to be addressed:
- According to TFA, the site was making significant profits, so this is not a case of non-profit IP infringement.
- Users of the site have not been targeted. It was the operators and/or administrators of the site that have been arrested.

Such taxes are however never "compensations for losses incurred via illegal acts". Either something is legal and you can tax it, or something is illegal and you cannot tax it (but you can prosecute it).

Sorry for being off-topic, but I have to mention that Sweden has a very amusing spin on this. In Sweden, it's illegal to buy the services of a prostitute. It is, however, legal to solicit sexual services. That means prostitutes need to declare income and pay taxes for the services they sell, even though they are illegal to buy!

In "smart" countries like the US, both sides are illegal, and punishment is much more harsh on the prostitutes than on the johns (they consider it a drug dealer vs. user paradigm). So life is pretty bad for the aforementioned ladies of the night: who are they to run to when a client is physically abusive? How much of a hurry would you be in to run to the police and tell them things they can (and will!) lock you up for?

Does this mean we now have official sites where we can stream / download movies in decent formats for reasonable cost? Like DivX sites operating in a erm... unofficial capacity under DMCA safe harbour provisions. These are reasonably anonymous with user uploaded content and a good selection of obscure / hard to find stufff.

AFAIK there's not a single legitimate video site that would satisfy my criteria and even youtube is operating in a grey area. Nobody wants to see compulsory licensing introduced as a result of market failure. Copyright may be a form of monopoly but there's no reason rights holders should be exempt from market forces.

Can someone who didn't post yet hand that guy a few mod points? This is pretty much dead on the problem.

I have money and I would gladly spend it on content. If it was offered to me, and offered in an acceptable way.

It takes AGES (years, literally) before a new season of whatever show I'd like to watch gets available in my country. Of course, dubbing and all takes time, but I'd be happy to have it in plain ol' English. And not only because the dubbing stinks for 9 out of 10 shows, where jokes get mutilated to the point where you can't even understand why it was supposedly funny. We're at least one-two seasons behind on our networks. Writer's guild strike? Some actor going bonkers? We won't feel it at least another year or two, and by then they certainly compensated with something. Hey, what a blast!

Then there's my pet peeve about anime. Some of the dubbing is just atrocious if you understand at least a few words of Japanese. They often get butchered with cuts that change the whole story, not to mention that certain animes won't ever make it here since, hey, comics are for kids and these things aren't suitable for our kids! Think I'll ever get to see a German dub of Hellsing OVA? Doubt it. Not only 'cause of the Nazis.

So let me buy what I want to have and I'll gladly throw my money at you! But please refrain from casting it in a package that I cannot accept as a licensee. If you force me to sit through half an hour of unskipable ads, I'm not going to buy. I paid for the content! If you want to litter it with ads, show it to me for free on private TV!

I really wish they would shut down every site out there that illegal links or shares copyrighted material, so that people have no way at all anymore to download movies and music. Then I would see the whole movie and music industry go in to oblivion because nobody will buy there crap anymore.

Are they really believing that if people couldn't share the movies and music, the people would suddenly buy more stuff? If anything, they would buy less stuff because they don't know anymore new artists or new movies.

As I was 18 I used a lot torrents, and I mean a lot. Like 5 movies and games every week. Now I don't use that anymore, do I buy more movies and more games? No, not at all. Why? Because that crap is just so expensive and I found so many new alternatives for entertainment. Like youtube where I watch news and starcraft 2 movies, and southparkstudios.com, and collegehumour.com. And I read a lot of blogs and news on the internet. For music I have youtube and lastfm and other services.

If I go to the Mediamarkt I see it why I stopped to buy new movies or music and why others are not buying, too. I see it because all the DVDs and all the music CDs are laying there around for years and nobody touches them. Because they are so freaky expensive. 20Euro for a old DVD movie, 30Euro and more for new movies and 30Euro and more for TV series.

Every time I go to the shop and see a nice movie, I see the price and I think: do I really want that DVD for that price? And the answer is every time: no, because it's just too expensive for just one movie that I will watch one day and then it will lay around collecting dust. If the DVDs would be like 5Euro each for new movies and under 5Euro for old DVDs I would buy them. But not for that price, no way. Because I have so much free entertainment.

I really wish they would shut down every site out there that illegal links or shares copyrighted material, so that people have no way at all anymore to download movies and music. Then I would see the whole movie and music industry go in to oblivion because nobody will buy there crap anymore.

Yeah, because it was all going to oblivion before the Internet and P2P, right?

As I was 18 I used a lot torrents, and I mean a lot. Like 5 movies and games every week. Now I don't use that anymore, do I buy more movies and more games? No, not at all. Why? Because that crap is just so expensive and I found so many new alternatives for entertainment. Like youtube where I watch news and starcraft 2 movies, and southparkstudios.com, and collegehumour.com. And I read a lot of blogs and news on the internet. For music I have youtube and lastfm and other services.

Good for you. But everyone else, why are they then downloading all the TV series and movies? Oh, because they actually want them not the youtube garbage. This is the old "I don't like them so neither should you".

Every time I go to the shop and see a nice movie, I see the price and I think: do I really want that DVD for that price? And the answer is every time: no, because it's just too expensive for just one movie that I will watch one day and then it will lay around collecting dust. If the DVDs would be like 5Euro each for new movies and under 5Euro for old DVDs I would buy them. But not for that price, no way

Every time they offer something for X$, there's someone who comes along and says "If only it was available for X/2$ I'd buy it. But if you actually lowered it, most of them would now say X/4$. Or X/8$. Reality is that we know the truth, those who really liked it already bought it at the high price and those who don't will find some other excuse not to buy it.

I don't mind copyright as such when I buy say a paperback book. The author wrote it, whatever deals good or bad he did with the publisher is not my problem, and he charges a price per copy. I buy my copy and that copy is mine, end of story. No DRM, no regions, no EULA, no licensed player that won't let me flip several pages at once (no fast forward), no disappearing ink pages that'll be gone if I resell it (one-time codes), I can sell it, burn it, make paper planes of it and it's a straight deal in every way except for the few limited rights actually in copyright law.

The problem is copyright enforcement which has turned into a huge inconvenience for the customers and is also threatening lots of privacy, due process and other laws. I don't want companies sitting on remote disable/delete buttons to everything I own. Of course you might say I should become a cultural hermit and just reject all commercial TV, movies etc. but I'd rather just take it while I wait for them to clue in and provide a service equal to the torrent sites - at any cost. I do buy the best on BluRay/DVD as the DRM is broken, but they go mostly unopened as I've already had my "digital delivery" long ago.

Every time they offer something for X$, there's someone who comes along and says "If only it was available for X/2$ I'd buy it. But if you actually lowered it, most of them would now say X/4$. Or X/8$. Reality is that we know the truth, those who really liked it already bought it at the high price and those who don't will find some other excuse not to buy it.

You see, a few years back, there was a huge price difference between the country where I was living (Luxembourg) and the country where I currently live (Germany). The content was identical, only the packaging differed (slightly)... I actually MD5'd discs to check. Now, how can the content industry justify an up to 300% markup on identical product between two neighboring countries? A TV series boxed set was 35 in Germany and 100+ in Luxembourg. In my first year in Germany, I bought way more content than the

I think it's really true that the value of hard copy media has gone down. For those of us with access to Netflix streaming there's a vast library of relatively high-quality content available with relatively little trouble. Any more I will only buy deeply discounted DVDs. Most of my recent DVD purchases have been very old movies I got used on DVD at yard sales. It's probably been more than a year since I bought anything new on disc. The last thing I did buy new on disc was a box set that turned out to be an

Not to mention if you buy a discount DVD they are usually filled with advertisements. Rip'd movies allow you to stream a list of.avi files to a player or just start the file. You get to enjoy the movie without all of the annoyance of the DVD interface, adverts, warnings, and promo's.

WTF is wrong with the Police? WTF is wrong with this world?.. Police makes this "great" arrests instead of arresting the drug dealers and murderers and many other shits from the streets? OMG..... what world we live in? A world dominated by money? a world where even arrests are made cos some rich ppl who make some movies ask that? WTF? If the movies would no be so expensive probably a site like kino.to would not be needed.... but it is... and all this shit will only bring rage and need for revenge to many ppl including me.. I feel like we all start to live in Ceausescu time... where somebody was "managing" to copy some anti-communist book.. and ppl was giving that book from hand to hand, in secret, to be rad by everybody.... is same shit that so called "movie industry" does.... this reminds me of another article i rad here some time ago.. about some police in Australia who arrested a journalist for writing an article about how to hack computers using Facebook... after a friend's computer was hacked that way... same shit... WTF... police does not work on itself anymore... they work for the ones who pay better? oh and as far as i remember: we, all of us pay the police to be fair... we pay their salaries by paying taxes... WTH?

Even when they arrest scumbags, the news is not to be trusted. The great European child porn raids of the past came down to basically nothing. If I remember correctly, they got less than 100 convictions for >1000 people raided, because most were actually innocent. The press still reported the high number and that is what the police seemingly was really after.

Police makes this "great" arrests instead of arresting the drug dealers and murderers

So we are supposed to believe that by virtue of selling drugs, someone must be a bad person? Obviously selling drugs makes you worse than violating copyrights, and puts you on the same level as a murderer, right?

The word "pirate" has been hijacked from the meaning of robbing ships at sea using violent threat to meaning copying a CD. This hijacking is convenient to the record industry, but I object to its use here. I do think that robbing ships at sea using violent threats is wrong.

I don't really see a problem. The word has several meanings. Robbing ships, copyright infringement, trademark infringement (counterfeit apparel). It pretty much boils down to 1) Robbing ships and 2) Everything else.

What I'm getting at is that there isn't really a lot of room for confusion when used in context. Nobody's going to think you boarded a ship if you "bought a pair of pirate Nike shoes", or "pirated Angry Birds". A lot of people won't even think of the pirates of old (the salty kind) if you mention

400 years if you count that non-pillaging use, 300 or so if you count the US copyright law (second reference in that Wikipedia article on copyright infringement).

The pirates arrested were guilty of piracy in that sense: organised copying and redistribution for profit. Piracy is a fine word. What I'm opposed to is people being labelled pirates for just copying movies to watch, if th

Every now and then, someone tries to argue that torrent trackers are supposedly invinsible because they don't outright host copyrighted content, but only the.torrent files. I really wish people would start focusing on something else, because by now it should be blatantly obvious that such reasoning does not fly with the courts. In my country (Finland), there was a court case regarding Finreactor, a major finnish torrent tracker and the defendants tried to argue this very defence. It didn't fly. At all. The court concluded that the site was MOSTLY used to facilitate illegal activity and that the site maintainers made no reasonable effort to clean the site up from torrents pointing to copyrighted content. The tracker admins were found gulty and sentenced to heavy fines.

No, this logic does not apply to Google, because Google is not used MOSTLY to facilitate illegal activity and no, this logic does not apply to gun manufacturers, because guns are mostly used by law enforcement and army and not to commit murder and robbery.

The defense of torrents is still valid, but the courts are wrong. Without opposition repression will spread. Already in most countries the same corrupt legal theory that some legal things are also illegal has led to the criminalization of armed self-defense. Already Google has had to alter its website to block torrent suggestions, and governments are seizing unapproved websites. Copyright parasites are demanding royalties from Google, and are pressuring ISPs to filter connections.

Considering that this is/., the submitter's alias is "freedumb" and the linked article is on torrentfreak, isn't the headline rather poorly constructed? The torrentfreak article is titled "Kino.to Raided In Massive Police Operation, Admins Arrested" which is a lot more accurate.

It is quite possible that at least the ones arrested in Germany will walk free. Currently it is unclear whether linking and indexing even can constitute a crime. It is however unlikely that in that case the state would have to compensate them for lost business, as the business is somewhat amoral, which is a factor in civil law. (Prostitution is legal in Germany, before you ask.)

My guess: Police hoping to make big positive headlines (which they have), but the case will collapse.

But seriously... customs officials at any of the world's borders make bigger busts than this all the time, for trafficking actual physical goods. For that matter, taking out a single Somali rowboat would be a bigger "piracy bust" than this.